Prioritize Actions
The second order of business is to sequence your project’s key activities and milestones in accordance with your business’ stated objectives for approving the program. If the project clincher was the rapid resolution of an operational challenge, tackle it first.

Getting a quick win on a highly visible challenge is a great way to lock-in your project sponsorship and gain the momentum that a transformational project like this needs. Conversely, if the primary driver for getting the project launched was the size of the prize, sequence your project to attack the areas of richest opportunity first. Capture those savings early, and use the savings to prefund the subsequent activities in the project.

Contingency Planning
Finally, ensure that your transportation management excellence program has a well-documented and published process review calendar. Projects have ebbs and flows to them. During one of the lulls, you want to have that pre-published calendar of process review meetings available to remind your audience of your continued progress and momentum. Also, have a contingency plan in place for the inevitable project disruptions that surface after kick-off. The mere presence of a “what if?” contingency project plan will calm the anxiety of your most challenging project participant.

Change Management and Communications
Projects that involve a great deal of change in the organization create both excitement and angst. It is the angst that you must proactively manage. The best method of managing an anxious audience is with consistent and constructive communication. Ensure that your program management team establishes and executes a change management and communications methodology from the outset.

Keep Score for Continuous Improvement
The final step in the process is to acknowledge that this journey is never completed. With a best-in-class transportation operation now established and running as designed, your final step is to deploy a fact-driven performance management program.

Essential Performance Measures
There are many business intelligence and reporting tool kits available in the marketplace. Many of these tools come pre-populated with thousands of defined metrics, ratios, and indicators. It is far more important to ensure that you are focused on quality in this area. Quantity— when it comes to analytical tools and performance measurement— can quickly become a curse rather than a blessing. Experience teaches that less is more in this area.

In step two, we discussed three key indicators that transportation management leaders can be identified by: (1) Transportation cost as a percent of revenue; (2) Annual year-over-year freight cost reduction/increase actuals; (3) Percentage of on-time deliveries.

With those three outcome-based measures, you have the core of a transportation management excellence performance management program. Beyond those three outcome-based measures, we typically work to define the appropriate additional operational metrics to deploy as part of the program. Typical operational metrics include items such as:

• Percentage of shipments delivered complete (right quantity of goods).
• Percentage of shipments delivered damage-free.
• Average lead-time for a carrier to accept or reject a tender (by carrier, by lane, by date range, etc.).
• Average time for a carrier to communicate in-transit updates.
• Average time for a carrier to communicate resolution of a problem/error.

Many other metrics could be listed, but the key take away is that less is more when it comes to transportation management excellence. Decide on the essential performance metrics that will instruct your continuous improvement efforts, and implement them in cooperation with your trading partners.

Deploying an Intuitive Score-Carding Portal
Another key strategy is the deployment of an easily accessed and reviewed score-carding portal. This deployment strategy is your single source of truth for all transportation- related pieces of your business. With everyone looking at the same figures, in the same environment, collaboration and shared understanding are the result.

Periodic Performance Reviews
Finally, you must conduct pre-scheduled, periodic reviews of your transportation management program. For some of the metrics, a quarterly review is appropriate. For others, weekly and daily frequencies are more appropriate for fostering continuous improvement. The key is to establish a pre-published calendar of reviews and required attendees so that all trading partners will have the same information, reviewed at the same time, in the same context. Consistency in execution feeds, fosters, and drives continuous improvement results.

In conclusion, we have provided a guide for pursuing transportation management excellence. By approaching the transportation management business process in this manner, you will have a series of facts and insights that guide your improvement, and instruct your leadership on the value and importance of the transportation management discipline. The importance of people, process, and technology cannot be diminished, nor can any one of the three topics be discounted. All three are central to your company’s progression toward transportation management excellence.

Scott Sykes is senior director of solution sales for Transplace, Matthew Menner is senior vice president of sales and alliances for Transplace, Vincent Chiolo is senior vice president of solution sales for Transplace.